Ethnomusicology has long occupied what might be termed a liminal space among the disciplines. Triangulating between the arts, humanities, and the social sciences, ethnomusicology has long held the ambiguous, middle ground between historical musicology and anthropology. If anthropology provided the methodological tools for musical ethnography, a heterogeneous world of musical performance contributed to the sounds, settings and significances that ethnomusicologists have sought to document and understand.
Elia Moretti and Alessandro La Rocca developed a research on folk music in southeastern Moravia. The tools of the research are following a track given by Ernesto De Martino, but with a peculiar perspective of an ecological perception of music. The process of imaginary folklore doesn't fit to a rearrangement or reinterpretation. Imaginary folklore might go very far from the original source, leaving the philological issues on the way. The concepts which people hold concerning the sources from which their music stems are of major importance in shaping a music system. The most common alternative sources, like the supernatural, individual human creativity or borrowing, are emphasized to greater or lesser degrees, and the particular emphasis given affects not only the potentiality of sound sources for music use, but forms of creativity, change in style, and other aspects of music as well.
Soundscapes can embody narratives, similar to the soundwalk or even more specific as a story when voice and text are involved. Such narratives can be situated in the present, the past or in the form of a myth. If the soundscape represents a particular hearing of the present, why has it been “traditionalized” to match visions of how the South Moravian wine region should look, feel, and sound for tourists? Other recent ethnomusicological studies have taken more experiential and social approaches that along these lines, a myriad of other understandings about the soundscape–place– music relationship should be investigated. We moved toward what Anthony Seeger has termed a musical anthropology, exploring the ways “musical performances create many aspects of culture and social life”. Imaginary folklore has led us, further, into speculations about language, and particularly about the concepts of the aesthetic and the interrelationships among the plurality of arts. Cross-cultural perspective, such an integral part of ethnomusicology, is needed here, as is the ethnomusicological approach which stresses not only the sound of music but the concepts out of which that music arises.
Common folksong images include little green meadows, pear trees in fields, buzzing bees, fishponds, and wild paths. Characters include fishes, black horses, grey falcons and little black swallows. The themes are about love, war, work, and drinking. Music is made meaningful by its connection to place and social environment. We always have the need of a meaning, because the human being always need a perceptible experience. The primary focus of the imaginary folklore process involved in this research is an ecological contemporary listening, but those listening attitudes and practices did not just appear from nowhere: they have their own history and have come about by means of a historical process that continues to exert its influence. Understanding the perception of musical meaning therefore involves a historical dimension that surfaces in different ways, and to different extent.